Letter 85: Neobanks Are The Future

You're leaving a lot of money on the table by not using one (cashback, yield, airdrops, and more)

A neobank is a digital-only bank that operates entirely over the internet, without any physical branches or locations. They’ve been around for over a decade, and have only grown in popularity and adoption as time has gone on.

The chart below shows the total app downloads of Revolut, one of the original and largest neobanks in the world, from 2014 to 2025:

source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1122668/number-of-ios-and-android-downloads-wordlwide-revolut-bank/

And this one shows how users are moving away from the old tradfi institutions Western Union and MoneyGram in favor of newer neobanks, Remitly and Wise:

source: https://x.com/aleximm/status/1876750780927008953

Neobanks are also one of the fastest growing sectors in crypto. It’s sort of a natural extension of the stablecoin boom, and brings to light some of the practical use cases that stablecoins unlock in the payments world.

Utilizing a crypto neobank basically allows you to avoid having to off-ramp your crypto. You no longer need to send crypto to a centralized exchange and then from there to your bank in order to spend it — you can now keep everything onchain, earning yield, and spend your money directly with a Visa or Mastercard.

There are three ways that crypto is getting involved with the neobank world:

1. Existing neobanks adopting crypto (ie Revolut)

2. Existing crypto-native companies launching their own banking features (ie Coinbase or MetaMask launching debit cards)

3. New neobank companies launching, built on crypto rails from the ground up

While there might be opportunity and value in the first category, I believe the best value and experience for most crypto-native users will come from the latter two categories.

We’ll explore some of them today, and I’ll share my personal favorite pick and the one I am most actively using.

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What are the different crypto neobank options?

There are already dozens of options on the market, and the “best” one is going to vary depending on your own situation. Just to highlight this, take a look at this comparison chart I found while researching that compares 12 different crypto neobanks — and it doesn’t even include the two that I have personally used myself: